HelloNeuman:When I was growing up I was coerced into giving $1 each week to the Catholic Church at Sunday Mass. I had no say in this and failure to comply ensured a prompt and vengeful response on Monday morning from the nuns who monitored this activity each week. (Our names and class numbers were on each envelope)

No, having gained free will and an understanding what the Catholic Church stands for, I WANT MY MONEY BACK! I WILL SUE FOR REPERATIONS!

Quit whining, it was only a dollar and at least they didn't rape you, torture false confessions out of you and your family and then take all your stuff.why is nobody demanding the return of treasures from the Vatican?

So you don't believe in "returnism" but you believe in stealing. Cool ethics bro!

THIS. Even if you're not giving it back, at least try and pretend you understand you stole it. FFS. I can understand why you wouldn't want to return it, politics is a dirty game, but you farked up, admit it and move on.

Funny thing, HE didn't steal it. He wasn't even farking alive when it happened. So no, he really doesn't need to understand that.

This is exactly like the blacks demanding reparations for slavery, in the United States. fark you. You weren't a slave, so unless you are going to do forced labor for the next few years, you aren't getting any reparations. Wellfare I guess isn't a reparation.

You ever represented a company before? Did you personally believe the Ecto-Cooler you were selling cured cancer? Nope, but that company sure did. So you opened your mouth and said Ecto-Cooler cured cancer. And thus, when the lawsuit hit, you weren't sued as a person, the company was sued for making false statements.

That's how spokespeople work. He did not personally steal it, or he'd be in farking jail. But the country he's representing did.

i understand his position but he's telling them to f*ck off and expecting to foster good relations. Kinda silly.

They're not even really a big secret anymore. You can go to a website right now and for less than $500 get a rock so big and bright your girlfriend's panties will break the sound barrier hitting the ground.

URL or we'll be forced to call shenanigans.

http://www.diamondnexus.com/round-brilliant-cut-classic-series.html

You can get a 4.91 carat synthetic diamond from them for less than 500. If you want to go comically large they offer a 16 carat diamond for $1600. Please don't do that, though. Nobody will believe you've got the scratch for a 16 carat diamond unless people think you've got a cool mil lying around just for rings.

Yeah, are we sure they're dealing in octahedral carbon diamond? The language used in their vid has more weasels than a Yorkshireman's pants. Gemesis comes out and says lab grown diamonds, Diamond Nexus talks about "the only difference is the chemistry" in their video and who knows what that means. Silicon carbide was mistaken for synthetic diamond 150 years ago and can be grown in crystals large enough to make armor.

johnnyq:I'm all for acknowledging our forebears mistakes and making up where we can, but Sir Harry Paget Flashman, VC, KCB, KCIE, didn't go through all that trouble during the First Sikh War smuggling the Koh-i-Noor out just to have it handed right back.

wildcardjack:Yeah, are we sure they're dealing in octahedral carbon diamond? The language used in their vid has more weasels than a Yorkshireman's pants. Gemesis comes out and says lab grown diamonds, Diamond Nexus talks about "the only difference is the chemistry" in their video and who knows what that means. Silicon carbide was mistaken for synthetic diamond 150 years ago and can be grown in crystals large enough to make armor.

I have no idea. But put 4 carats worth of whatever it is in a setting, and put it in a little black box. Taa-daa.

Sometimes the stealing protects the item, especially if the area of origin is in a war zone, politically unstable, or extremely impoverished. If your people are digging up your archaeology and selling it though, you can't really blame the outsiders.

And why we, as a people, put such value on pressurized carbon is beyond me. Why not just pick a coconut? Or a found beetle carapace? It's all in the value of what we say its worth. To me, diamonds are a way of saying "im giving you all my cash for a useless rock that my fiancée wants, so i keep getting bj's, so here..here is all my cash for a hunk of stupid carbon." Why not just give her a CZ or something that you won't have to pay your next 22 paychecks for? fark diamonds, they have no value to me, nor does gold, or any of that shiat. Just because greedy people say it does, doesn't make it so.

Ok, you can have the diamond back. And Briaian will have back the infrastructure, the Indian cities it founded, the roads and railways, the courts, schools and universities, the English Language, the civil service and army, the democratic institutions it left in place etc etc etc.

The whole theft/return idea is ridiculous on a massive scale. Almost everything that has a history was essentially 'stolen' by this definition. Is India/Egypt/Greece planning on a complete audit of their entire national possessions to establish original ownership and whether they were legally transferred and then going to return them? No because that would be STUPID.

Half of their own countries only belong to them through conquest and subjugation. Why is there something special about the european conquests of the 16-19 centuries that makes that stuff 'stolen'?

ChildOfBhaal:johnnyq: I'm all for acknowledging our forebears mistakes and making up where we can, but Sir Harry Paget Flashman, VC, KCB, KCIE, didn't go through all that trouble during the First Sikh War smuggling the Koh-i-Noor out just to have it handed right back.

Gordon Bennett:kbronsito: I've never been to London... is there an entrance fee to go into the museum? Maybe people who had their crap stolen from them should have it waive by showing their passports. Because it's a dick move to steal someone's stuff but its an even more dickish move to charge them money to look at it.

There is no entrance fee, but there is a large urn just inside the entrance for those who choose to give a recommended donation. It's quite interesting to see as it has money from all around the world inside. I doubt that it is emptied often.

As for returning their treasures, India is free to wait along with Greece and Egypt. The advantage of having built history's greatest empire is the legacy of stolen treasures from all over the planet and building the British Museum which is surely the world's greatest monument to theft on a grand scale. It may not be right, but at least it's all on display inside a genuinely stunning building for the world to see.

Besides, I can't imagine any sort of genuine global attempt to return property and land taken in the past through force and treachery without the lot of us returning to the Old Stone Age. There comes a point in which you really must stop fighting battles in retaliation of injustices committed against your long-dead ancestors against the other side's descendants born years or even centuries after the fact.

gaspode:The whole theft/return idea is ridiculous on a massive scale. Almost everything that has a history was essentially 'stolen' by this definition. Is India/Egypt/Greece planning on a complete audit of their entire national possessions to establish original ownership and whether they were legally transferred and then going to return them? No because that would be STUPID.

Half of their own countries only belong to them through conquest and subjugation. Why is there something special about the european conquests of the 16-19 centuries that makes that stuff 'stolen'?

Some nutbag ex-surgeon from New York bought it and took it back to the Village with him.

IIRC he was one of those hippy-dippy crystal flake cape-wearing new-agers like you'd expect from that neighborhood. Really strange fellow. But it was a long long time ago and I can't find anything about it any more, sorry I got no linky.

Bit'O'Gristle:And why we, as a people, put such value on pressurized carbon is beyond me. Why not just pick a coconut? Or a found beetle carapace? It's all in the value of what we say its worth. To me, diamonds are a way of saying "im giving you all my cash for a useless rock that my fiancée wants, so i keep getting bj's, so here..here is all my cash for a hunk of stupid carbon." Why not just give her a CZ or something that you won't have to pay your next 22 paychecks for? fark diamonds, they have no value to me, nor does gold, or any of that shiat. Just because greedy people say it does, doesn't make it so.

And why we, as a people, put such value on slips of paper is beyond me. Why not just pick a coconut? Or a found beetle carapace? It's all in the value of what we say its worth. To me, cash is a way of saying "im giving you all my time and effort for a useless piece of paper that my fiancée wants, so i keep getting bj's, so here..here is all my free time and energy for a shred of stupid paper." Why not just give her a square of toilet paper or something that you won't have to sacrifice all of your free time for? fark cash, it has no value to me, nor does gold, or any of that shiat. Just because greedy people say it does, doesn't make it so.

Everything is only worth what we agree it is. It's best to make your peace with it.

Just a quick question here- wasn't it "stolen" from the people who stole it from the guy who absconded it from someone else who knifed someone in the back to get it, or something like that? Asking for its return would be kinda like the Goring family asking for the return of art that Grandpappy stole from all the museums in Europe and were then taken away.

johnnyq:I'm all for acknowledging our forebears mistakes and making up where we can, but Sir Harry Paget Flashman, VC, KCB, KCIE, didn't go through all that trouble during the First Sikh War smuggling the Koh-i-Noor out just to have it handed right back.

I still wonder if Fraser was hinting that his son "Havvy" was actually fathered by Lord Cardigan (similar lisps), but I've never seen any mention of that supposition.

Suede head: Ok, you can have the diamond back. And Briaian will have back the infrastructure, the Indian cities it founded, the roads and railways, the courts, schools and universities, the English Language, the civil service and army, the dem

Britain took the welcoming, trusting, and peaceful people of India, one of the richest countries in the world in the 16th century and divided, conquered, destroyed, raped, pillaged, and utterly revaged the area, which affects are being felt until today.

They started with this plan 3 centuries before Germany and Italy were even *countries* and whatever meagre, rickety *infrastructure* Britian created was solely to increase their own profits by moving aw goods faster. Any roads or schools the british founded were about a million times less in form, scope and function than what the Indians would themselves have done over these past 3 centuries (much like the Germans industrialized from hut dwelling people and unpaved open sewer cities over 3 centuries to modernity).

Indians couldn't even make their own *salt* until late in 1930s' and were not allowed to own factories, work in higher positions in "govt" (ie Raj), have education, create capitalist infrastruture or invent or develop anything or start any factories or any companies...all the point of swords and guns. British made their hyper-mercantalism retard India's progress even after independence, since the 3 centuries of subjucation naturally meant that capitalism itself became suspect coontil recently) in that country.

They took their fortune with the industrial revolution and made the entire sub continent destitute (the ones that survived that is).Britain is directly reponsible for multiple Indian holocausts, including Bengal famines (once the richest region on Earth). Food was, on multiple times and places diverted from starving families to teach them a "lesson" to not resist British rule, upwards of 20 million died cumulatively.

hitlersbrain:You can grow diamonds pretty cheap in a lab. They are actually quite worthless. The only way to tell which ones were dug out of the ground by some dying African slave worker is by looking for the imperfections that are hard to fake. The more perfect the diamond, the less value it has.

quote from above:What's sick about this is that the British establishment destroyed the Sinhalese people completely. Completely and purposely, sadistically. Stole their land, humiliated and massacred their government, made it Imperial policy to erase every shred of self-respect the Sinhalese had left. You can talk about the Nazis all day long, but for my money nothing they did was as gross as what you find out when you actually look into the history of British-Sinhalese relations. If you can even call them "relations"; I guess a murder-rape is a relation, sort of.But nobody knows about it. Weird, huh? Nothing weirds me out more than the total news blackout the Brits have managed to put on all the sick shiat they did to brown and black people all over the world. They had a system, and it worked. They'd grab some paradise island in the tropics, use the Royal Navy to wall it off from the rest of the world, and crush the local tribe. If the locals resisted, the Brits would starve them to death, shoot them down, infect them with smallpox or get them addicted to opium-whatever they had to do to gang-rape the locals so bad that they'd lose the will to resist.

And to this day, they don't catch even a little bit of Hell for it. Everybody thinks the Brits are all cute and harmless. You're all a bunch of suckers for those suave accents, you suckers! The truth is that compared to the Brits, the Nazis you're always yammering about were a gang of eighth-grade stoners who ran around spraypainting swastikas on school property. The Nazis lasted one decade; the Brits quietly ran their extermination programs for three hundred years, and to this day they wouldn't even think of feeling guilty about it. Wouldn't cross their minds.

What happened in India over 3 centuries cannot be processed by rational sane human minds but here is a little sampler, a little fart in a large wind to give you a taste of the benovolent British colonial rule.

The complete extermination of the Mau Mau in Africa, by the british. The British do leave their colonial conquests so much better than they found them, don't they ? (as opposed to the horrible Belgians, oh my!)

---- quote ---Way back in the 19th century, the local British agent said (people were more honest about this stuff back then): "The only way to improve the Kikuyu is to wipe them out, but unfortunately we depend on them for food supplies." [...]The British settlers turned out to be even more degenerate than the old plantation South-I remember reading that at one plantation in Kenya, the first thing a guest was offered was a tray (carried by a Kikuyu maid) with a hypo full of morphine and a little packet of cocaine, and whichever you picked, they'd keep it coming as long as you were there. Colonial hospitality.The Kikuyu were being wiped out, to the point that even Churchill, not exactly a bleeding heart, complained that it seemed a bit much to keep killing Kikuyu "on such an enormous scale."[...]Another innovation in storytelling that the Brits understood way, way better than the Germans, who were amateurs at PR, was this one: never talk about how many of them you killed; only talk about your people that they killed. That policy was why I never heard as a kid how many Kikuyu died when they finally rose up against the Brits.[...]Elkins estimates the number of Kikuyu killed by British forces at something like 300,000. Quite a little massacre there. Funny you haven't heard of it, huh? Well, like Elkins said in an article she just wrote after archives were released that totally confirmed her version, that's because the Brit historians who should have told the story decided not to. They knew, all right. They just didn't care to tell.Turns out the Brits basically put the whole Kikuyu population in concentration camps-more than 1.5 million civilians inside the wire, and if they died of every African disease that was going, all the better. Actually the Brits used the same technique against the Boer women and children in the Boer War-purposely killed off 25% of the total civilian population to demoralize the guerrillas they couldn't beat in a fair fight-so it shouldn't surprise anyone . But it will, because they've sold y'all their Hugh Grant version of themselves.---

Yeah, but they built roads in africa I'm sure. And can you believe the horrible Belgians ? Yeah, let's talk about those Belgians.

Weaver95:you want that stuff back, form and army and invade. otherwise forget about it.

Current United States government to American Indians: Remember that little chunk of land currently called "the United States" we stole from you well over 150 years ago? Yeah, you're never getting that back.

IamAwake://I dismissed it because I have never stepped foot on a reservation, thus there's no way I'd let myself take money for something that isn't *me*

Oh, I see. Don't want to take that government money meant for the poor little red kids on the reservation huh? Yeah, you really don't know what you are talking about. Here's just one of the sources of revenue of the tribe. So, unless you can honestly say you would not accept a scholarship from Caesars Palace, your righteousness is misplaced.

Oh wait, I almost forgot, this is too funny. The benevolent, bumbling, monty python reciting, good, fair minded British, in Africa (which compared to India wasn't even all that important to them but they still did this):

Seems that castration, burning suspects alive, and ass-rape with broken bottles was a favorite counter-insurgency technique for British troops in Kenya:

"Bottles (often broken), gun barrels, knives, snakes, vermin, and hot eggs were thrust up men's rectums and women's vaginas. The screening teams whipped, shot, burned, and mutilated Mau Mau suspects, ostensibly to gather intelligence for military operations, and as court evidence." At the time, the British government sought to circumvent international accords. Forced labour was constantly imposed in the camps. Kenya's defence minister had said of the use of detainee labour: "We are slave traders and the employment of our slaves are, in this instance, by the Public Works Department."

Say, about about a spot of tea, old chap ? Now about those Belgians, can you believe what they did ? We only made our places so much better than we found them....

bmihura:Current United States government to American Indians: Remember that little chunk of land currently called "the United States" we stole from you well over 150 years ago? Yeah, you're never getting that back.

Well it's true. I'm a bit of a pragmatist about these things. People get conquered. Maybe one day the conquered can gain sufficient numbers or a tactical advantage and become the conquerors, but until then work with the system or die.

Treygreen13:Half of their own countries only belong to them through conquest and subjugation. Why is there something special about the european conquests of the 16-19 centuries that makes that stuff 'stolen'?

White guilt.

Treygreen13:You are so riiight. White guilt ! That's it!

The multiple holocausts, mass starvations concentration camps, mutilations and destruction have nothing to do with it, it's a little guilt...much like the Nazis too are not revered and celebrated because of ..white guilt getting in the way. Suuuch a brilliant clarifying observation....

ITGreen:"One of the world's largest diamonds, some Indians - including independence leader Mahatma Gandhi's grandson - have demanded its return to atone for Britain's colonial past. "

So one diamond will atone for Britain's colonial wrongdoings? No? Then giving it back is only the first in a line of "atonement" gestures to be demanded later by India.

I actually agree with the British on this one; nip this stunt of theirs in the bud.

I could go with the whole 1.4 billion people on a nuke tipped subcontinent versus a bunch of rocks the size of California but hey...that's too much wasted time, energy, and pomp and circumstance and....and....well Fark it India. Go dig up another diamond. Nuke DeBeers and you'll have them all. And probably some new ones.

So all I got out of this thread is that it is okay to steal anything because everything was at one point owned by someone else, and thus the only thing you can't steal through the Fark Logic of Deduction is the stick used by the first primate who figured out he can use it to scratch his own arsehole.